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Recently, on a car trip with my little boy, I decided to try listening to an audiobook.

In the past this hasn't been a success. He loves to be read to in person, both picture books and chapter books. But he not a fan of listening to books in the car. At best he's indifferent, but usually he just asks me to turn them off.

Generally speaking, he'd prefer to listen to Macklemore's Thrift Shop, which he calls "The Sway Music."

But he's four now, with a vocabulary that's diverse to the point of being a little creepy. (I taught him "cruft" yesterday.)

So I plugged in the Audio of Gaiman's Graveyard book. For those of you who don't know, Gaiman reads his own audiobooks more often than not. Lovely accent aside, he's fucking amazing at it. Really irritatingly good.

We listened to it for about 10 minutes or so, then I heard him saying, "Dad? Dad!" from the back seat.

I sighed and turned it off, I expected him to tell me that this was boring and we should stop. Or that he wanted to listen to the Sway Music or one of his, as he puts it "Kid CD's."

But it wasn't anything of the sort, instead he said. "Dad! I'm listening to the story and I can see the pictures in my head!"

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah," he says. "It's like a movie!"

I couldn't be happier. Neil Gaiman as his first audio. My boy has good taste. "What does it look like in your head?" I ask.

"There's a hill, and on the top of it there is a fence and a graveyard!"

We talk about the story for a little bit. He's slightly confused on some points: he thinks the boy's name is Jack, and he thought that the man who was coming to hurt the boy was invisible except for his hand. (Which is understandable, given the way Gaiman describes things, focusing on the hand and the knife.)

But generally he was getting it. More importantly, he was enjoying it.

I know this because for the next couple days, whenever we got into the car, he asked if we could listen to "the story of the boy that lived in the graveyard."

Yes, yes we can.